A new sign language created over the last 30 years by deaf children in Nicaragua has given experts a unique insight into how languages evolve.

The language follows many basic rules common to all tongues, even though the children were not taught them.

It indicates some language traits are not passed on by culture, but instead arise due to the innate way human beings process language, experts claim.

The US-led research is detailed in the latest issue of Science magazine.

Debate

The development of language has long been the focus of debate. Some people in the extreme "nature" camp believe that grammar is essentially hard-wired in the brain, while those in the extreme "nurture" camp think language has no innate basis and is just culturally transmitted.

This research has made some of the most interesting discoveries in language acquisition in decades

Steven Pinker

It has been difficult to clear up the argument, because most existing languages are ancient in origin and it is therefore hard to pinpoint how they formed.

That is why the sign language invented by a small group of deaf children in Nicaragua is so unusual. It has given scientists the clearest insight yet into how humans learn language.

"When people study historical linguistics to try to figure out how languages are born they are usually looking at old historical data, like scratches on rocks," explained co-author Ann Senghas of Columbia University, New York.

"This is the first time we have had the opportunity to observe it in action because the originators are still alive."

Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard University and author of a seminal book on the acquisition and evolution of language - The Language Instinct - is impressed by the findings.

"I think this research has made some of the most interesting discoveries in language acquisition in decades," he told BBC News Online.

"It shows that children have sophisticated mechanisms of language analysis which give language many of its distinctive qualities."

Crude gestures

Before the 1970s, most deaf people in Nicaragua stayed at home and had little contact with one another, according to Dr Senghas.

Then, in 1981, a vocational school opened, and the children began to communicate with each other. No one actually taught them to sign, but they began to develop a system of gestures to get their messages across.

At first, these were rather crude and pantomime-like, similar to the gestures a hearing person might make if they had to describe something without speaking.

But as a new wave of children learned the gestures they turned them into a sophisticated sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), complete with traits seen in nearly all other languages - both spoken and sign.

One key trait that the children adopted is called "discreteness". This refers to the process of breaking down information into small manageable packages.

Expressions of motion are particularly useful for studying discreteness in spoken and sign languages. In developed languages, we break up the idea of continuous motion into separate words.

So, in the expression "rolling down the hill", one word (rolling) conveys the movement, while another (down) conveys the direction.

But if a hearing person were asked to convey this idea in gestures alone, they would almost certainly do it with a single continuous movement.

Rolling cat

Dr Senghas and her colleagues showed the deaf people from each of the age groups a cartoon, in which a cat swallows a ball and then wobbles down a steep road. Then they asked the participants to tell the story.

The oldest group, who invented the initial "crude" form of NSL, told it with one continuous gesture as a hearing person might.

NSL follows basic rules common to nearly all languages

But the younger groups did something different. They separated the movement and direction into separate signs as is done in spoken language.

"If they were just clever at learning they would have learned to do it the way they had seen it being done," said Dr Senghas. "But that isn't what they did - they ended up acquiring something different. They ended up breaking down the gestures into something they could build a language out of."

This is compelling evidence that humans are predisposed to develop language in this way, say the researchers. In other words, children instinctively break information down into small chunks so they can have the flexibility to string them back together, to form sentences with a range of meanings.

Interestingly, adults lose this talent, which also suggests there is an innate element to the language learning process.

"We lose the ability to break information into discrete elements as we age," said Dr Senghas. "It is not just that children can do it, but adults can't do it."

Dr Senghas does not claim her findings support the extreme "nature" camp, but that they do suggest there is an instinctive component to the way we learn language.

"It doesn't prove that language is hard wired to the degree some people say it is, but it does prove the fundamentals of language are part of the innate endowment," she said. "So you don't have language or grammar in your head when you are born, but you do have certain learning abilities."

Professor Pinker said the results of the study showed something that had always been suspected by some psychologists.

But, he said: "Since children's language ordinarily ends up the same as their parents' language, one couldn't easily pinpoint what their minds added.

"It takes a case in which the language children end up with is more complex than the language they hear to identify the creative contribution of the child."

According to the report, qualities such as application, self-regulation and empathy were more likely to be developed in children whose parents employed a "tough love" approach.

It found that these qualities made "a vital contribution to life chances, mobility and opportunity".

The report said these characteristics were profoundly shaped in pre-school years.

The most important influence is the quality of parenting

Building Character report

The Building Character report analysed data from more than 9,000 households in the UK.

It found that children from the richest backgrounds were more than twice as likely to develop the key characteristics compared to those with the poorest origins.

Additionally, children whose parents were married were twice as likely to show such traits than children from lone parent or step-parented families, the report said.

But it added that when parental style and confidence were factored in, the difference in child character development between richer and poorer families disappeared.

The report concluded that this indicated that parenting was the most important influence - and the same result occurred when the family structure factor was analysed.

The report said that other positive influences included the main carer's level of education, and breast-feeding.

Girls were more likely to develop character capabilities by age five, while no connection was found between paid employment of either parent and children's characteristics.

The authors urged more support and information for families, and for children with disengaged or low-income parents to be given particular focus.

They recommended that the Government's Sure Start programme should be refocused as a tool for early intervention, with less emphasis on childcare and more on development; improved pilots for the Family Nurse Partnership; and for health visitors to be given an early years role to help with parenting.

'Ambitious agenda'

"There is some evidence that lower-income households face more difficulty in incubating these character capabilities," the report said.

"But the most important influence is the quality of parenting.

"Confident, skilful parents adopting a 'tough love' approach to parenting, balancing warmth with discipline, seem to be most effective in terms of generating these key character capabilities.

"An ambitious agenda for equality of opportunity will need to take the development of these capabilities seriously."

Ms Lexmond added: "Far from a 'soft' skill, character is integral to our future success and wellbeing."

Parentline Plus chief executive Jeremy Todd said the charity also supported the call for increased help for families.

But he said different children reacted differently to parenting styles.

"If we are to reduce the strangle hold of cycles of deprivation, the issue of how we support families to raise children must be grasped," Mr Todd added.

"We welcome this report and hope that it stimulates debate among policy makers around how best to support families to transform our society into one where we top the league tables for outcomes for children and well-being."

The findings suggest that unborn babies are influenced by the sound of the first language that penetrates the womb.

Cry melodies

It was already known that foetuses could memorise sounds from the outside world in the last three months of pregnancy and were particularly sensitive to the contour of the melody in both music and human voices.

Earlier studies had shown that infants could match vowel sounds presented to them by adult speakers, but only from 12 weeks of age.

Kathleen Wermke from the University of Wurzburg, who led the research, said: "The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their foetal life.

Newborns are highly motivated to imitate their mother's behaviour in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding

Kathleen Wermke, Unversity of Wurzburg

"Contrary to orthodox interpretations, these data support the importance of human infants' crying for seeding language development."

Dr Wermke's team recorded and analysed the cries of 60 healthy newborns when they were three to five days old.

Their analysis revealed clear differences in the shape of the infants' cry melodies that corresponded to their mother tongue.

They say the babies need only well-co-ordinated respiratory-laryngeal systems to imitate melody contours and not the vocal control that develops later.

Dr Wermke said: "Newborns are highly motivated to imitate their mother's behaviour in order to attract her and hence to foster bonding.

"Because melody contour may be the only aspect of their mother's speech that newborns are able to imitate, this might explain why we found melody contour imitation at that early age."

Debbie Mills, a reader in developmental cognitive neuroscience at Bangor University, said: "This is really interesting because it suggests that they are producing sounds they have heard in the womb and that means learning and that it is not an innate behaviour.

"Many of the early infant behaviours are almost like reflexes that go away after the first month and then come back later in a different form.

"It would be interesting to look at these babies after a month and see if their ability to follow the melodic contours of their language is still there."

About Me

“It is said an eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him with the words, 'And this, too, shall pass away.' How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!” ~Abraham Lincoln